Here are a couple of wonderful quotes that came into my email inbox this morning.
Meditating in Nature
“If you find that meditation does not come easily in your city room, be inventive and go out into nature. Nature is always an unfailing fountain of inspiration. To calm your mind, go for a walk at dawn in the park, or watch the dew on a rose in a garden. Lie on the ground and gaze up into the sky, and let your mind expand into its spaciousness. Let the sky outside awaken a sky inside your mind. Stand by a stream and mingle your mind with its rushing; become one with its ceaseless sound. Sit by a waterfall and let its healing laughter purify your spirit. Walk on a beach and take the sea wind full and sweet against your face. Celebrate and use the beauty of moonlight to poise your mind. Sit by a lake or in a garden and, breathing quietly, let your mind fall silent as the moon comes up majestically and slowly in the cloudless night.”
– Sogyal Rinpoche
Confronting Fear
“When we’re afraid, the mind tends to dart away instead of diligently and deeply entering the fear. It gets confused and thinks, “Let me take care of myself first,” as if it weren’t responsible for the whole world. Part of what zazen—sitting meditation—does is to help us settle down into gentle, unswerving attention and peel away that false sense of separation.”
–Bonnie Myotai Treace, from “Rising to the Challenge,” in the Spring 2003 issue of Tricycle Magazine
I live in a rural area, so nature is very easy for me to come by – I just walk out my door, or to the lake, or go a few miles inland and be in the forest, but what I have found, always, whether it be in a rural or urban area, that cemeteries are remarkable “nature” places. In urban cemeteries, I have always noted that once you walk though its gates, the world transforms, and you are IN nature, and IN a place that reminds you that we are all but flicks, feathers, in an enormous world that we don’t understand, necessarily, but profoundly affected by, just as one is by walking into a Redwood forest. All the dead people lying there, loved, and unloved, are monumental, extraordinary! I was recently in Oregon, and I was in two cemeteries, one out in the boonies and the other in a more settled area, but in each case, I realized a profound sense of Being. I would like to insert a couple of photos I took, but I don’t think I can. One of which was so important to me, was a beautiful stone sculpture/headstone of a tree, with all kinds of elaborate decorations of ferns and birds, of a man who died as a lumberjack at the age of 30 in 1894. The same year that a government imposed a ban on the open use of the Lithuanian language. This man died in Oregon making America that year and a language was tried to be killed on the other side of the world, but both live, really.
Thank you Sunada, for your thoughtfullness.
Hi Nora,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! You clearly get what Sogyal Rimpoche is talking about. I guess cemetaries in particular include all the stories of the people buried there, which adds to the mystery of the place. I hadn’t thought of it that way.